Alan Robert is best known as a musician and singer/songwriter of the bands Life of Agony and Spoiler NYC, but he was first and foremost a comic guy. A graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York City where he studied cartooning under Walt Simonson and others, the rock star is now in the midst of his second career as a comics artist and writer. At a time when celebrities will put their names on a comic but let others do all the work, Robert is creating comics that are written, drawn, colored and even lettered by him and include back page material taking readers through his process and workspace and have some fun along the way.

After the success of last years miniseries Wire Hangers, IDW is releasing a new miniseries from Robert starting this month. Crawl To Me is a strange dark tale that was created in just a matter of months and shows growth and experimentation over his work published just a year ago. Talking with the budding horror icon is a real inspiration and its clear that Robert is having the time of his life.

ALEX DUEBEN: I read the first two issues of Crawl to Me and they were, and I mean this as a compliment, really fucked up.

ALAN ROBERT: [Laughs] Thank you. I take it only as a compliment.

AD: Now that weve gotten that out of the way, could you describe the book?

AR: It is a psychological thriller leaning more towards horror just because of some of the traumatic events that occur in the book. It basically focuses on this one character and his experiences which lead him to believe that hes losing his mind. I dont want to spoil the ending, but what you think is happening, is not actually happening.

AD: Right now there are a lot of celebrities doing comics, but youre not coming up with the idea and everyone else does the work, youre doing everything in this comic. Even the lettering, which you didnt do in your last comic.

AR: I always wanted to do that kind of thing. Im new to comic creating, professionally anyway. I always wanted to create comics long before I ever got into music. I went to school to become an artist. I actually wanted to be a Marvel penciler in my twenties. Right upon graduation I ended up going on tour with Life of Agony because we had just locked down our first record deal. So I got sidetracked, but I always loved comics. I always wanted to see that dream come true.

When I finally had some time I pitched Wire Hangers to IDW and they loved it and really supported me with that project. Along the way, I guess I wanted more and more control over the process. Not that they did a bad job at all with the lettering. With Wire Hangers, I handed in all the art and the script and had the production artist do the lettering for it. With Crawl To Me, I learned a lot from Wire Hangers and I was like, I can handle the lettering too. It actually made it a lot easier to me to submit the final piece to IDW because part of my process was creating the dialogue once the art was finished. I would know in my head what the panel should look like, whats seen and whos talking to who, but I didnt write any of the dialogue until the art was done. That made it a lot easier to do the lettering for it.

AD: Backing up, what kind of comics were you into when you were younger and that inspired you to become an artist?

AR: Well I grew up reading my dads silver age books. He had all the original Spider-man comics, Fantastic Four, all that stuff. I had always been drawing from a young age so I would draw those superheroes. Then later on [I was] creating my own books just for my own personal satisfaction, that never went anywhere. In my teenage years I would go to the New York Comic-cons and meet people like Mike Zeck, who did the Punisher limited series and worked on Spider-man for a while. Somewhere along the line I found a book called Arkham Asylum. Dave McKean had done all the artwork and it was something that I had never seen before. It was chaotic beauty and it changed my perspective on what comics could be. Once I saw that it really inspired me to want to create a comic in that kind of visual chaos. I got into more nontraditional artists from that point, people like Ashley Wood, Bill Sienkiewicz, Alex Maleev, Ben Templesmith. I started picking up comics mostly because of the artists not so much the story.

AD: How does the artwork youre creating today compare stylistically to what you were doing when you were younger?

AR: There are some similarities but its definitely matured and especially even from last years Wire Hangers to Crawl To Me, I purposefully wanted it to look different. Wire Hangers had more of a cartoony exaggerated type of feel because that was the nature of the book and Crawl To Me, I really focused on making it look a little more mature. I introduced a lot of hard lines, the color palates different, even the grids of the page layouts are drastically different. I was purposefully trying to make it look different and more mature, I guess.

AD: Crawl To Me feels like a psychological horror story where youre pushing the horror aspect while these stories typically push the psychological.

AR: Its tricky because I visualize this stuff, mostly because Im so influenced by film. I picture them as screen shots of a film so they almost act like storyboards in my mind of what these camera angles look like. The thing that you dont get in this medium is the sound effects and suspenseful music that film lends itself to. When you take the audio away from some of these horror scenes, its really tricky to create that in 2-D. Building suspense is one of the biggest challenges, I think, in the medium.

AD: You described Wire Hangers as something that had been percolating in back of your head for a while. When did you come up with Crawl To Me?

AR: Last winter. I think I came up with it in November and I pitched it to IDW by December. We had a deal by January and I was already starting to draw it in February, so it was pretty fast.

AD: Did putting together the book so quickly mean that the process changed for you from how you worked on Wire Hangers?

AR: I learned so much with Wire Hangers. IDW had faith that I could deliver another completely different horror story and they liked the premise right away. I dont think that I even submitted interior pages to them when I pitched it. I just did a couple of covers and gave them the premise and of course the twist ending and they jumped at it.

AD: What has it been like working with Chris Ryall, whos the Editor in Chief at IDW and has edited your books?

AR: Hes the best. Im a rookie when it come to comics, but he was the one person that I reached out to when I first had Wire Hangers together. We hit it off right from the get go and hes given me all the freedom to see my visions come to life. He basically helped me launch this second career and I owe him a lot. I always tell him that and hes like, oh, come on. [laughs] But he really did. He gave me a lifelong dream come true and IDWs been completely supportive of all these stories. They took a chance on me and hopefully I can deliver.

AD: One of the things I loved about the comic was the extras in the back, especially the fake public service announcements.

AR: [laughs] Thats part of the freedom that they give me. The comics got to be 22 pages, but in the back is any kind of content that I want to put in. I chose to add these kind of question and answer pages that I always used to love reading in the back of comics growing up, to hear more of the inside thoughts of the creators. I thought that would be a nice touch.

AD: I know theres talk of film version of Wire Hangers, has there been any progress?

AR: Its actually just picked up momentum the past couple of weeks. Were in really serious talks with some fantastic visual effects houses in LA. The work that they do is just phenomenal, so Im super excited about that. As soon as I can announce something, I will. Theres also been talks about bringing Crawl To Me to the big screen, too, and hopefully well have some news on that pretty soon.

AD: This week were missing Comic-con.

AR: Yeah. Every time I look at my twitter feed I get jealous. [laughs]

AD: I know what you mean. Is there anything coming out at the convention you regret missing?

AR: I really want to see this Captain America movie. I know it comes out this weekend, but I was hoping to get some inside scoop on that. The Avengers is cool. Theres just a lot of artist friends of mine out there right now. I was there last year for the first time and it was just great. Plus its my wifes birthday. It always falls on my wifes birthday. She gave me the golden pass last year.

AD: Youre not getting that every year.

AR: No, thats not going to happen two years in a row.

AD: So whats next for you? Youve mentioned that you have an idea for a sequel to Wire Hangers.

AR: Well I have a couple of different ideas that I wrote short stories for that I want to bring to comics. Theyre not necessarily horror. Im not sure if thats the right move for me to do next year being that Im building this horror story fanbase recently, so Im not sure what the right thing to do is next. Being that it takes such a commitment to get these series out, Im literally just drawing and coloring nonstop to make the deadlines on these, I really have to be a hundred percent about it. It might be a continuation of Wire Hangers. I already wrote a sequel to Crawl To Me. Or something completely different. It all depends on the film development too because whichever one goes first, the timing might be right to do the sequel.